


aftermath

by Sylv



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Psychological Trauma, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 22:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylv/pseuds/Sylv
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erica dies first. Boyd dies second, which means that Cora is going to die last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	aftermath

Erica dies first.

When they’re given their moments of respite, they whisper about it. They doubt it’s because she gave up; she wasn’t the sort. Even in her rare minutes of weakness, she never allowed herself to lie down and take it. She cried, she shook with pain and sorrow, and she stood back up again. They come to the conclusion that it’s most likely that trait which made the alphas focus on her. Strength, determination, too much force of will.

They can’t be sure whether they kill her directly, or if they torture her and leave her to bleed out and die on her own. Either way, Erica dies first.

It’s Cora who smells it. Above the dirt, the metal of the bank, the blood both fresh and drying is another, sweeter smell. Decay. Cora has smelled death before; her house stank of it as she sprinted away from the crackling fire at her back.

She freezes when she notices it, eyes wide, nostrils dilated. Boyd notices because that’s what he does; he looks after his girls even in the hopelessness of capture and shields them from what he can. Even though he is the newest wolf amongst them, even though Cora could talk him in circles with the facts she has in her head about werewolves, the knowledge that she started learning at birth.

He starts to ask because his hand lands heavily on her shoulder, but the words don’t come. Cora turns to look at him. His eyes are wolf-gold, his nails now claws digging into her skin. Lips curled back in a snarl, his fangs out and dripping, and Cora has never seen him look like this before. Not a wolf, she has seen his wolf many times before in the countless hours the alphas have poked and prodded at them. There’s rage, unimaginable fury rolling off of him in waves, and something hidden behind that. He looks afraid. Stricken. Weary. Sad.

They don’t dare go look for the body. Sometimes the alphas leave the door to the bank vault open. There is never any sound, nothing but rats crawling through the debris, but someone is always there. The last time they attempted a coordinated escape, Boyd was beaten so badly that his right eye was swollen shut for two days. There was no talk of trying again.

So Erica dies first. And they can’t brush her hair back from her face. They can’t clean her up and lay her body down on a bed of flowers where she belongs, eyes closed and arms folded across her chest. They can’t give her the kind of sendoff that she deserves. They can’t see her to say goodbye.

Cora and Boyd do not speak after that for days. Food and water is brought in by sneering alphas, the terrifying one with claws on her feet, the cocky twins who send constant jibes in Boyd’s direction. They never see the leader of the group, the blind one whose words are frozen coming out of his mouth, and leaves frost in the wake of his steps.

Cora likes it best when the big one brings them their meager fare. He does not talk to them, barely even looks at them, and leaves them be as soon as he sets down the food. He knows that there is no need to torment them over the death of their companion. Their own minds can do that well enough.

She thinks they might be going crazy. They haven’t been outside in weeks. They mutter to themselves, Boyd’s eyes glow gold in the middle of conversations for no reason at all. She can feel her whole body heat up and she’s sure that her eyes are doing the same.

The vault door is closed almost all the time now. It might be because they rush it sometimes, throwing themselves at the metal and breaking limbs, tearing muscle, ripping skin so that blood is dripping down their bodies before they can heal themselves. Cora watches the cuts on her arms stitch themselves back up. She feels invincible.

Boyd hides in the darkest corner of their room most of the time. Cora will curl up next to him, and he will wrap a strong arm around her fragile frame. He smells like unwashed clothes, roiling emotions just under the surface. His heart constantly beats a frantic tattoo against his chest. She wonders at how it hasn’t burst from his chest yet.

They cannot tell whether it is day or night outside. The days are counted only by the meals that they are served, although these seem to be coming less frequently as of late. Cora can’t tell if she’s imagining that or not. She snarls every time the vault door is opened, lunging down onto all fours, allowing her body to twist and contort into her wolf shape.

When her brother and the others come for them, it feels no different. There is no food, and they linger, saying words that she can’t understand over the rush in her head. She can feel Boyd even from across the room, electricity zipping between their bodies, and they’re in coordination when they attack, him fangs, her claws, legs and arms and full body tackles at whoever it is because wow something is singing in her veins and it feels like magic, like she’s on a kind of high that she never wants to come down from.

They’re stronger, faster. They’re violent. They’re almost unresponsive.

They get taken home soon after that. Cora feels herself adjusting again, settling back into the mundane responses to the lunar cycle. Boyd is dropped off at his house because he has a family to go home to, and Cora is brought back to a dingy loft with her brooding so-called brother. She isn’t sure yet if it’s really him.

It is. He talks to her when she prompts him enough. He has the memories that Derek would have, of teaching her how to ride a bicycle and bringing her to her first PG-13 movie where she cried and had to be taken out of the theater. But he doesn’t smile, doesn’t laugh, certainly doesn’t have that arrogance that she finds she misses in him. She doesn’t like this Derek Hale. This is not _her_ Derek Hale.

Cora is given a cot to sleep on. It’s hard and uncomfortable and unfamiliar, and she often wakes up in the morning on the floor having thrown the blankets off, hugging a pillow to her chest in place of a warm, solid body.

Cora misses Boyd.

He starts coming over more often. He tells her, when they’re alone in the kitchen and everyone else is too busy talking in the other room to listen, that it took a lot of lying and then a lot of chores to first convince his parents that all he did was make a mistake by running away for a while, and allow him to go see his friends again.

He says that he misses her too.

Of course, there is no recovery. They both know this. There’s school, and work, and the new alpha pack to deal with. Cora and Boyd are left out of the planning sessions at first. It will trigger them, Scott argues while they sit together, holding hands and eavesdropping. There’s no need to put them through that.

Derek agrees. Stiles says they need as much manpower as they can get. No one asks them.

Sometimes Boyd will call the loft in the middle of the night. He has nightmares, he tells Cora, and he doesn’t say anything else about it, but she suspects that her voice might help to calm him down, to ground him in the reality that they are out of there, that they made it.

Even if someone else didn’t.

She doesn’t mind that he wakes her up when he needs to, because Boyd needing her somehow helps quell the fear in her gut. The living, writhing feeling that there is something coming after her, after _them_ , that they will take Boyd, and her changed brother Derek away from her and there will be nothing that she can do to stop it.

Boyd pretends, she can see. He pretends that everything is alright, that there aren’t scars beneath his skin that no one else is able to see, even when they are looking right at him. He’s a quieter kind of sad that Cora can’t understand.

She copes by getting angry. At Derek and all of his stupid new friends, at the fact that no one came looking for her, not Derek, not even Laura, at the alpha pack and what they did and counting how many push-ups and pull-ups she can do, how quickly she can demolish the new punching bag that Derek has hung in the empty space of his apartment.

She blames him. Unfairly, some part of her brain knows. He was younger than she is now when the fire happens, when their entire family is caught inside and has their flesh melted off of their bones. But he never came back for her, and she was so young and so scared and he and Laura should have known better. They should have _known_. It seems like Derek doesn’t really know anything, though.

One evening, Boyd shows up at the loft with no prior warning. Cora lets him in, even though Derek isn’t home. He drops his bag and lifts Cora up into his arms, holding her and hugging her, and she can’t remember feeling his safe and this loved in a very long time.

He ends up helping her with her math homework at the kitchen table. The radio is on, playing some ubiquitous pop song, and Cora is very frustrated with pre-calculus. Boyd is good at math. At science too, and explains better than her chemistry teacher how to do the problems assigned.

The song changes, and he looks up at her, hand resting on top of hers. They try not to make eye contact often because the taint left by uncontrolled wolf eyes seeps into them, even now. He draws her up out of her chair and close to his chest. His heart is beating fast again, as fast as it did when they were prisoners, and Cora leans her head against the sound. He’s here. He’s alive.

They dance, out of tempo and clumsy. Cora loses count of the songs that go by. All she can hear is the blood in Boyd’s body and feel his breath in her hair, and the trembling of his arms next to hers.

She looks up, and his face is composed, open. There are tears on his cheeks, and she wants to reach up and brush them away, but she won’t because she is crying too. It is the first time they have since Erica died.

Cora does not consider the loft a home even though she lives there. She doesn’t think Derek does either because she sees the unopened boxes in the corner of his room. She herself refuses to stop living out of the suitcase that he gave her full of clothes and shoes. Only her toothbrush sits in the bathroom for convenience.

Since this is not her home, it bothers her less than it should that the alphas barge in whenever they would like, making threats and smacking people around. She does not sleep much anymore. She’s always on her toes, balancing by the precipice that the wind threatens to tumble her over at any moment.

Boyd dies second.

Something goes wrong with his plan. Something always goes wrong, and no matter what they do, the bad guys will always win. Cora can’t feel hopeful about much these days.

She runs to him, breath caught in her throat, thoughts clamoring to be heard about how she knew this was going to happen and that she wouldn’t be able to save him and how she is all alone now and _Boyd oh god no Boyd please be okay, please please please_ …

That heart that was always so powerful, that could beat faster than she could count is dull and stuttering, irregular pumps of blood that don’t go anywhere except out of the wounds in his chest. There is static in her ears. Her skin is prickling and she thinks she might kill someone. Thinks that she _could_ kill someone.

It isn’t until later, after his body is gone and she is scrubbing at the place that he fell that she allows herself to scream. She screams and screams until her voice goes ragged and there is nothing left in her.

Boyd dies second, which means that Cora is going to die last. One, two, three.

The prospect does not frighten her. She accepted the inevitability of her death back in the bank vault. Or was it when she escaped through the trees on her family’s property, listening to their screams of anguish and the smell of sizzling, burning flesh in her nose?

She hates that she is last. That she is made to trudge onwards in this cursed town without them, with only older brother Derek, who is almost as broken as she is, to keep her company. There are more fights to partake in, more riddles to solve and more innocent people to save.

Cora hopes that maybe… but no. The universe scoffs at the idea of mercy. With her luck she will die at a ripe old age in a nursing home, and no one will be there to greet her when she does.


End file.
